This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Nicholas Granatino.

Which is the best-ever, high, net-worth divorce? Until last week, the McCartney-Mills spectacle of 2008 would surely have topped the list of greats, on account of its cast, lunacy, water-throwing, tale-telling, costumery, incalculable wealth and that mutual loathing that is vital to a really gripping divorce hearing but not always so nakedly on display. But the ranking cannot be permanent and with last week's exit from the Supreme Court of Katrin Radmacher and her defeated ex-husband, Nicolas Granatino, it must be time for a rethink.

Occasional evidence of vulnerability on both sides, and some charm on one, made the Mills-McCartney show a faintly guilty pleasure. But with each new detail, the Radmacher-Granatino debacle confirms that here are two people whose antics can be relished, thanks to their peerless ghastliness, wholeheartedly and without a trace of embarrassment. London, the divorce capital of the world, was the perfect setting for a greedy squabble between foreign-born millionaires that masqueraded as a dispute of highest principle.

In terms of character, it was like reading the new Jonathan Franzen: hard to say which flawed individual excited less sympathy. Is clever Mr Granatino the more repellent of the two, with his determination to sponge off his wife despite a promise never to do so? One should not be taken in by his Sorrows of Young Werther oufit, featuring a tragic but surely unseasonal little comforter. Did not his ex once reveal that Mr Granatino had been the kind of spoiled husband who could not be satisfied with normal woollens? "It was always Loro Piana; cashmere, then baby cashmere, then vicuna in all colours." As if the blue tone-on-tone look he worked outside court was not evidence enough of that particular weakness.

In contrast, Ms Radmacher's sensational post-hearing costume, a plunging zip-up white mini that set off her polished orange chest and bare legs, was presumably intended to be both sexy – as in ha-ha Mr Granatino look at me in all the papers – and to confirm her status as blamelessly virginal. In comparison, Heather Mills's choice of court-wear – a varicoloured trouser suit of her own, eccentric design – looked rather sweet. It is a further point in Heather's favour that, at least, she never claimed that her £24m win was a victory for little people.

In a triumphant interview, Katrin Radmacher, still swanking around the moral high ground, celebrated her part in improving the lot of humbler English housewives. "It would be so much better to lay out at the start of a marriage what will happen if the wife gives up work," she told the London's Evening Standard's Anne McElvoy.

Notwithstanding that one would rather take expert advice from Jessica Rabbit, Ms Radmacher's legal analysis is accurate. Pre-nups now have status in law, sort of, and it's all thanks to her refusal to give up around £2m of her £100m fortune.

Some lawyers think that outcome is wrong. By upholding a decision of the appeal court, thus confirming the validity of a freely made prenup, an eight to one ruling by the Supreme Court has now pre-empted any decision on prenups by the Law Commission, which is contemplating the chaos that is English family law and, it is hoped, shortly to propose ways of reforming it.

Of course it is an ancient tradition that English divorce law should be decided by cases brought by impossibly rich misers or their resentful spouses. It is another ancient tradition for the law never to be decided quite firmly enough that yet more rich misers and resentful spouses cannot challenge it in future, which ensures that lowlier divorcing couples can never receive clear advice from their lawyers. Thus Radmacher's sense of virtue as she departs, fortune intact, for her home in Monaco, via a recuperative holiday in Dubai, leaving us the indisputable gift of the prenup: "It is important to me that no one else should have to go through this."

If divorce lawyers are not inconsolable about a future shortage of savage, high-end disputes, it is because they also predict following Radmacher an unending surge in demand for prenuptial agreements. Moreover, it will still be possible for prenups to be challenged by spouses who are wealthy enough to protest, in the courts, that their agreements were not, however it might have looked at the time, fair Apart from anything else, can a couple who are passionately in love be said to be of sound mind?

At the time that the warring Radmacher-Granatinos plighted their troth, for instance, we have madam's assurance that: "I fell head over heels with him. I was madly in love and we married too quickly, before I had really got to know him." But perhaps she was not as mad as all that.

The Supreme Court records her father's insistence that she sign a prenuptial agreement or forfeit her share of his colossal wealth. In effect, if Granatino, then a wealthy banker, did not complete before the marriage a document drawn up by his fiancee's family lawyer, his wife would be disinherited. That such a contract, worthy of anything in Jane Austen or, for that matter, a Tudor court, could hardly be described as neutral is just one objection to the Supreme Court having decided, on the basis of this notably unenlightened case, to validate pre-nuptial agreements. Lady Hale, dissenting from the majority verdict, argued that "the object of an ante-nuptial agreement is to deny the economically weaker spouse the provision to which she – it is usually although by no means invariably she – would otherwise be entitled". The Bishop of Blackburn has noted that a prenuptial agreement rather pointedly contradicts this line in the marriage service: "All that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you."

But the entitlements and sharing of a conventional marriage are precisely what impelled generations of rich dynasties to contract out, à la Radmacher, and now explain why more and more couples would rather cohabit. Divorce law now lags so far behind reality that, in an impressive House of Lords debate, Baroness Deech urged the government to reform legislation created in the age of dependent wives "to ensure that financial provision on divorce is determined on fair and settled principles".

Until then, if the Radmacher precedent saves just a few spouses from archaic laws and modern lawyers at the same time that it propels ex-trophy wives into gainful employment, the eponymous divorcee probably deserves her triumph. If nervous couples are thereby nudged up the aisle, the Church of England might also find itself indebted to our orange-legged heroine. Even those who find it hard to imagine simultaneously vowing to share and not to share may be grateful for another lesson, hard-learned by la Radmacher: never trust a man with an unhealthy interest in knitwear.